ALMEDA is a five-year research project with three interlocking ambitions:
By researching the history of literary metadata about African expressive cultures in libraries and archives, we aim to understand the ways in which colonial cataloguing constructed the idea of the ‘literary work’. How did colonial catalogues classify oral and performed expressive cultures and how has this impacted our continued understanding of the literary field up to this day?
We aim to develop a multilingual metadata ontology specifically designed for the large body of oral, unpublished, and informal literary materials that have been, and continue to be, a major part of literary production on the continent. By rethinking the organisation of the literary field around published books, we aim to improve the visibility and authority of non-book literatures in the field of African literary studies.
Our major outcome will be a linked open repository of metadata on oral, unpublished and informal African literatures. By creating and linking metadata on this body of work, this repository will make these literatures searchable and visible despite their structural ephemerality. The repository, which is run as a Wikibase Instance, is currently in process and will be opened as soon as possible. Please contact us if you have any questions.
ALMEDA in collaboration with the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University invites you to an online workshop on Thursday 4 September at 13:15 – 16:00 (Central European Summer Time). In this workshop scholars will discuss the implications approaching street preaching as performance and oral literary genre. Viewing publicly delivered sermons…
ALMEDA postdoctoral fellow, Gloria Ajami Makokha, presented a paper, “Digitizing Jina: Providing Visibility to The Khanga’s Oral Literary Messages”, at the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) conference, held at the University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria, 9–12 July 2025. Makokha’s research project focuses on the ways in which the Khanga…
We have published two new datasets on our Zenodo platform that will interest anyone working on print and online literary magazines. The classic anti-apartheid South African magazine Staffrider includes around 1770 individual texts and was published between 1978 to 1993, while the Ugandan-based Lawino content is much more recent (2014-2015).…
In our new ALMEDA pamphlet, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen interviews Coffi Abdoul Karim, a producer of the Ivorian cultural programs Théâtre de chez nous and Ce soir au village. The interview is part of a larger exploration in Makkonen’s work of the theatrical scene and its relationship to television history in Côte d’Ivoire from the…